English Speaking X

It is often claimed that despite many years of learning efforts, Japanese people cannot speak English at all. But in lieu of lamenting this fact, it is more useful to think about what has created this terrible situation. In my opinion---and I feel many people agree in this---it is simply because most Japanese people have little opportunity to use English in their daily lives that they cannot speak it fluently. So if you want to do something about the current situation, what you need to do is not complain about Japanese people’s ineptitude in learning a foreign language but provide them with as much opportunity as possible to practice speaking.

This view naturally led me to the idea of holding an event in which every participant, whatever his or her nationality, would be required to use English. When I hit upon this idea, I thought it might be appropriate to call such an event “English Speaking X” in the sense that its main focus would be upon improving the participants’ speaking skills.

Yesterday this idea finally materialized, and five advanced learners of English, all of them Japanese, gathered at Mita campus (in Tokyo) to discuss some pedagogical issues in English. I am an assistant professor but the other four are graduate students and three of them have a very high TOEIC score (over 900).

Although I hadn’t prepared any specific topic or theme to discuss, the fact that every participant was in some way or other involved in English education naturally prompted us to talk about pedagogical issues. First of all, we discussed why it is so difficult for Japanese learners to speak English. Of course, everybody cited the lack of opportunity to use English in everyday life, but another reason cited was the system of English education in Japan that tends to choose accuracy over fluency.

To be able to speak English accurately would require many years of training and a great deal of grammatical and lexical knowledge, but if your English is not strictly accurate, it is still possible to communicate. There are many people in the world whose English is not grammatically impeccable but who is still capable of interacting with others. If you pay too much attention on accuracy, however, you will have great trouble improving fluency, which might make communication itself impossible. So it is very important, in teaching or learning English, to weigh accuracy against fluency.

After discussing this problem, we switched to another topic. I said to them, ”Suppose you were teaching English to Junior high school students or high school students and suppose that a student of yours came to you and asked, ‘Why is it necessary to learn English?” How would you respond to that question?’” If you were an English teacher in Japan, this type of question would be the most recalcitrant one. For example, the questioner might point out that his or her father cannot speak English but makes a lot of money, which they might say proves that learning English is not necessary at least in Japan.

One possible answer we came up with was that though it is not strictly indispensable to learn English, it will at least broaden the learner’s horizons and open up many possibilities. And being able to speak English will make it easier to access various sources, which will help garner information efficiently. Another way of handling this question we discussed was to try to convince the questioner of the importance of learning English by pointing out that things are changing rapidly and that the world is far more interconnected than it was twenty or thirty years ago, when the questioner’s parents were in their twenties. Indeed, the society is paying a lot of serious attention on English proficiency these days, which is palpably reflected in the fact that influential corporations, such as UNIQLO, now adopt English as the official language.

But as far as I am concerned, the ultimate answer to this type of question would be that he or she is not yet entitled to judge what is necessary and what is not; they are too young and too inexperienced to assess the value of what they are learning. I would tell the questioner that when I was as young as him or her, I didn't think that learning English was so important; that only when I was able to speak English to some extent did I realize how useful it was. Dogmatic as it may sound, this type of response is, I believe, not so preposterous. Learning something new allows you to look at things from a new angle. And if you look at something from a new angle, even if you are looking at the same thing as you did before, you might notice that it has an aspect which you were previously unaware of but which puts it in a far more favorable light. So learning a new thing without understanding how it will become useful in the future is sometimes unavoidable.

After considering these matters, a participant offered a new topic: to what extent should high school teachers teach pronunciation to their students, or how much emphasis should they put on correct pronunciation? Her own opinion was that since SAE is now regarded as the model in most high schools, as least as a teacher she should try to imitate American English. I disagreed with her idea and claimed that she should put as little emphasis as possible on good pronunciation because what is "correct" pronunciation is now difficult to decide, especially as English is now spoken in so many parts of the world that it is almost impossible to think of the language as something monolithic (though a number of Japanese people show a surprising incapacity to understand that American or British English is not the only correct English). Indeed, if you imagine the situations where Japanese students will be required to use English in the future, it is more than likely that they will have to communicate more often with non-native speakers of English, such as Chinese people and South Koreans, than with native speakers, and if they are incapable of understanding various types of English that are used by those non native speakers, however similar their English may be to British or American English, they might have a lot of trouble performing their jobs. So it is better to emphasize grammar and vocabulary over pronunciation, because the former two seem to be less variable than the latter.

Another participant, however, pointed out that whatever kind of English you may speak, you at least should know, as a fact, that, say, the sound of "l" and that of "r" are different, or that saying "shit" when you should say "sit" might produce a devastating result---an opinion with which I couldn't agree more. But at any rate paying too much attention to correct pronunciation can produce the same effect as paying too much attention to grammatical accuracy, of discouraging learners from trying to speak English. School teachers have a duty to assure his or her students that it is OK to speak English with Japanese accents.

And, after this, the same participant that had raised the question of "pronunciation" offered another question: a typical high school class consisting of more than 30 students, and it being only natural that some students are more proficient at English than others, how should high school teachers decide what part of their class to zero in on? If they devote their energy to improving higher level students, their class might be unbearably difficult for lower level students, whilst if they focus on salvaging less proficient students, that might bore students with higher proficiency---a situation traditionally called Catch 22. I maintained that they should home in on higher level students, but the other participants were skeptical of this. They said that ideally they should cover all the students of their classes. But was it possible? It was extremely difficult, if it was worth a try.

At this point, a glance at my watch reminded me of the fact that a participant was supposed to leave at 5 p.m. because of an appointment. It was 5:05, so I told her so and that it would be better for her to go. And along with her, all of us left the class room we had used, and moved to a cafe called Veloce near the campus, where we continued to speak English and, since all of us were palpably Japanese, captured other people's attention, but we couldn't have cared less.

Taken together, this event was a great success. I think we should continue to hold a similar event at a regular interval.